In our own day we witness the extraordinary fact that such comparatively recent personages as Shakspere and William Tell are all but denied, an attempt being made to show one to be a nom de plume, and the other a person who never existed. What wonder then, that the two powerful Races—the Lemurians and the Atlanteans—have been merged into and identified, in time, with a few half mythical peoples, who all bore the same patronymic.
Herodotus speaks of the Atlantes—a people of Western Africa—who [pg 805] gave their name to Mount Atlas: who were vegetarians, and “whose sleep was never disturbed by dreams”; and who, moreover,
Daily cursed the sun at his rising and at his setting because his excessive heat scorched and tormented them.
These statements are based upon moral and psychic facts and not on physiological disturbance. The story of Atlas gives the key to this. If the Atlanteans never had their sleep disturbed by dreams, it is because that particular tradition is concerned with the earliest Atlanteans, whose physical frame and brain were not yet sufficiently consolidated, in the physiological sense, to permit the nervous centres to act during sleep. With regard to the other statement—that they daily “cursed the sun”—this again had nothing to do with the heat, but with the moral degeneration that grew with the Race. It is explained in our Commentaries.
They [the sixth sub-race of the Atlanteans] used magic incantations even against the Sun—
failing in which they cursed it. The sorcerers of Thessaly were credited with the power of calling down the Moon, as Greek history assures us. The Atlanteans of the later period were renowned for their magic powers and wickedness, their ambition and defiance of the Gods. Thence the same traditions, taking form in the Bible, about the antediluvian giants and the Tower of Babel, and found also in the Book of Enoch.
Diodorus records another fact or two: the Atlanteans boasted of possessing the land in which all the Gods had received their birth; as also of having had Uranus for their first King, he being also the first to teach them Astronomy. Very little more than this has come down to us from antiquity.
The myth of Atlas is an allegory easily understood. Atlas is the old Continents of Lemuria and Atlantis, combined and personified in one symbol. The poets attribute to Atlas, as to Proteus, a superior wisdom and a universal knowledge, and especially a thorough acquaintance with the depths of the ocean; for both Continents bore Races instructed by divine Masters, and both were transferred to the bottom of the seas, where they now slumber until their next reäppearance above the waters. Atlas is the son of an ocean nymph, and his daughter is Calypso—the “watery deep.” Atlantis has been submerged beneath the waters of the ocean, and its progeny is now sleeping its eternal sleep on the ocean floors. The Odyssey makes of him the guardian and the “sustainer” of the huge pillars that separate the Heavens from the Earth. He is their [pg 806] “supporter.” And as both Lemuria, destroyed by submarine fires, and Atlantis, submerged by the waves, perished in the ocean deeps,[1776] Atlas is said to have been compelled to leave the surface of the Earth, and join his brother Iapetus in the depths of Tartarus.[1777] Sir Theodore Martin is right in interpreting this allegory as meaning:
[Atlas] standing on the solid floor of the inferior hemisphere of the universe, and thus carrying at the same time the disc of the earth and the celestial vault—the solid envelope of the superior hemisphere.[1778]
For Atlas is Atlantis, which supports the new continents and their horizons on its “shoulders.”